hello hello hello welcome back to yna you are not alone i'm your host cheyenne joined by my co-host will what's going on cena how you doing and brandon hi everyone and today's topic is on social media let's talk about that so in today's world social media it has an effect on people's mental health and most of time it's negative you know it can bring us down more than it brings us up and um when it when it comes to that and social media like what cno would you
say would be like a negative aspect of it or even a positive one i think one positive thing i really have understood with social media is how i've been able to connect and communicate with people all around the world being able to create friendships and to be able to continue those kind of friendships and try to understand people more and get to know people more visit new experiences new foods new countries new people new cultures social media has really introduced me to those kind of things but
unfortunately like in life a lot of good things have bad things that come with them right and when we think about social media we usually think with mental health that it's a negative thing and it's really isn't but it is at the same time because it's such a touchy topic with mental health unfortunately when we do start feeling disconnected we start to become bored we start to get lonely we start to feel this sense of we need an answer to whatever issue that we're having
and so we kind of go to social media for that answer and a lot of people don't get the positive energy that they need when they do enter social media because we're surrounded by people who are either photoshopping faking their lifestyles not truly showing what's going on and they try to set up a front about who they are and what they're doing and what their ideas are but that doesn't mean every person on social media is doing that there's also people out there who are trying to
show the other side of the light and i think the thing that we've been getting so lost in these days is that and i think the most important thing is we're disconnected we're more disconnected than ever with us with a app and a system that's supposed to keep us connected more than ever right and so we've created this issue and i have to ask you will has there been any points of times where you felt more disconnected rather than connected with social media oh definitely i mean i think everybody's
kind of gone through it but you kind of it's very easy to get stuck in a cycle of the endless scrolling right and you had mentioned that people kind of people do go to social media to see maybe find like an answer whatever they use uh facebook instagram myspace and myspace yeah back in the day but um i think a big part of that is also like people are also kind of shoving away like what's actually going on in the real world and they go to social media to kind of cover it up not necessarily even
looking for an answer and me and i'm sure a bunch of others are guilty of that too and for a long time too because social media is designed that way with social media being designed that way i like tick tock that it keeps throwing content towards you it's an endless it's an endless source of content that doesn't stop and will never stop because people are always posting people always want to become tick tock famous people always want to they see these people who are going from nothing
to beginning to something once they get a certain amount of likes and certain amount of follows and that's the issue we're so stuck in this world of likes comments and follows that we lose this interaction of like just what humans need humans need a source of interaction and social media is a source of interaction unfortunately it's not a face-to-face interaction which we do very well at and which we need i feel like with energy it's a lot easier to gain energy when you're in face-to-face
conversations when you can see emotions when you can see the psychology behind somebody and just to see how they react to certain things on social media it gives them time to react you don't have to show who you are you can put up a front and you can show like your whole other lifestyle it's unfortunate and brandon when you get disconnected rather than being connected is there anything that you feel as if social media has maybe helped you get connected and do you have any
maybe uh positives towards social media and mental health together with that i feel that with social media and a positive health uh mental health to that um usually with that i feel when it comes to social media there's a lot of things that i see on there that kind of put me in more of a good mood depending of what i'm looking for so for an example uh with me that kind of puts me in good moods like i look at a lot of inspirational tick tocks like those are
my thing uh there's actually tick tocker that who i really enjoy watching his name is vic blens he is a barber but also he goes around to certain areas there's one that i actually watched today he know that right yeah he's hype he is hype he's really nice um he was in atlanta and he came across uh four kids um so he asked them like you know can i cut you up real quick he starts giving them free haircuts and then he starts talking to the youth because what his mission
what he likes is that he wants to help with the youth and also bring positivity so he asked him you know what is your goal what is your dream what do you like to do so he starts talking to them and then like from right there i start getting addicted to those videos and i feel that it kind of makes me uplift myself because you know like i always personally will myself i always wanted to help out the youth from my own community but also communities that also suffer
and it's always something that's been on my mind so just taking those ideas it doesn't have to be exactly like that but it's just you know you just take you follow a group a blueprint that someone gives out but then you add your own twist to it so i feel like things like that or videos like that are able to give my mindset more in a positive way so with social media i feel as if we can give a voice to people who are voiceless and in communities when they need the good
gofundmes when they need help when people need to reach out for maybe some sort of medical bill dr bill whatever thing that's going on in their life there's people out there who do want to help especially if they're very close with you friendly and they understand who you are that gives the voice to the voiceless and it's really important too to always give back to your community i mean here at yna we're trying to give this mental health information to people
that are out there who are struggling with whatever they're going through i noticed that more like in recent years like people being genuine like on social media it used to be like influencer central and like people living these fake lives and now like you really do see a change in a slight change in social media with people being genuine now there's like this genuine wave and i think that's so important because as social media needs to evolve we will evolve with it and as we slowly go down
this road um i think instant gratification plays such an important part and i know how of an important topic that is to you cheyenne so maybe give us a little bit of what is instant gratification and what are the bad things about it and what can it lead to when it comes to instant gratification i mean we live in the age of like we get everything now everything is just instantaneous so when we see people at this high level or they're already producing at a high level
it just it makes us feel like this should be easy it's because when we try these things and they end up not being easy and they actually take this amount of work it we almost self-reflect upon that and we we just feel like we're not doing enough almost all the time but i mean like i feel like a good comparison would be like when you see a professional athlete um just playing any sport like football basketball golf literally any sport you're watching them play at like their best at in their
primes and what you don't see is them working in the gym the work that it took for them to get to that point so all we really see is kind of their highlights in life and that's like what we see in social media too from all these influencers you see all their highlights you see all their highs because nobody wants to show the lows and even your friends yeah and and most of the time these people it's not like they're setting these guidelines to success they're just saying like i did
this this and i got this great success you know and they leave out the work that it took or the specifics of it and that's where everything kind of gets lost in translation and um it just leads to us feeling bad about ourselves because it's it's really not realistic for you to just jump into something and be the best at it to do your best to even if you give it your all everything takes work everything takes practice nothing in this world is just reliant on pure skill
and that that's where i feel like we lose a lot of it and i feel like with passion and practice you kind of fall in love with whatever you're doing and you kind of realize whether this is for you or whether it's not any and i think that's a great point with it so it's like with instant gratification once you understand the work you're either willing to put it in or you're not and that's going to be the final answer on whether you move on with it or not but with instant gratification we slowly
lead to a world of addiction and addiction itself is a whole new topic however we're going to focus on just social media addiction when we get bored unfortunately we find different ways now to make a answer to that boredom and with social media it's a really quick uh it's a really quick jab i would say it's an easy it's an easy fix to your problem yeah it's very toxic cycle you need to go on a 15-minute break i can just hop on tick-tock i need to go and find out
whatever political news from whatever amount of different people i go on twitter whatever things you need there's answers for it there's a fix for and this is how it's leading to social media becoming such a negative light on mental health because with mental health it's all about understanding your self-awareness understanding who you are but then also understanding what things that can trigger you what things are going to force you into depression what things
are going to make you feel lonely sad whatever it is and with boredom it leads you into the world of let me get my quick fix let me get my quick answer do you believe in that boredom is the social disconnection and what can we do to stop feeling bored in these situations when we need a 15-minute tick-tock break i don't always think it's the boredom although it is like a major role of it i think where the disconnect comes from people getting lost in the negativity of it is they're comparing
themselves as one person to the whole world because i mean like our whole world is almost like all over social media and that's what we compare ourselves to all the time and it's not just always about you know like oh i have nothing better to do with my life let me just like go on social media it's like you you go on there to like like not everybody just goes on there when they're bored people like go on there for information they go on there for how to's they
they look for guidelines because in our life we always want guidance no like no matter what it is but when we see this guidance is like oh you see all these people at a higher level than you are they've reached more success they have like more likes more views well like whatever the case may be it's just that that's where you could really just get lost in it and when when it comes to boredom like we're we're smart as human beings like we know what to do like i like i love to play
basketball i love to make music like i know how to do this without the use of social media like i know how to disconnect from it and feed like into my boredom and like find like that instant gratification for it but again like when you're comparing yourself versus the world you're gonna lose every single time so like you people need to be more realistic with the goals that they set and how they view other people's and how they self-reflect other people's success or
whatever it is that they're looking at and to help better themselves as human beings and on a side note of that just like the people that you do look at especially celebrities or nba players any sports players any any big people um it could be related to gym and fitness you know the biggest people out there or the most beautiful people out there they they these are the top .01 percent of the population even less than that yeah to compare yourself to those people is just you sh you can't do that
with social media becoming such a crazy topic these days we sort of get comfortable with where we are and comfort is the is the thing that we have the biggest issue is once we become comfortable we go back to the comfortability we find different ways to stay comfortable we make sure that when things start changing we don't allow them to because we want to make sure that that we stay in the position that we are and that's what can lead you to a negative aspect
of your mental health because once you get comfortable it's really difficult to set your brain and to tell your brain to be like hey i want to go try this new experience i want to go try something new but you're like it's something new i don't know what's gonna happen i don't know the answers and you'll never know the answers and i think you should never i don't think you should ever stay comfortable i don't want to come off and say comfortability is always bad but
when you do want to try new experiences and new things it becomes difficult so when you are in a position of wanting to do new things try new foods try new places going and finding some things that are interesting for you and try to use social media maybe to help you find the new experiences use social media instead of its uh benefit of keeping you comfortable and comparing yourself use it maybe to find the new things that you want to add to your life because once you add new
things to your life you as a human being will start growing and that's the most beautiful part about life right we want to grow we want to evolve into the people we imagined ourselves being 10 years 20 years 30 years down the road and it takes the little things in life again the details can lead to changing the whole bigger picture can you can paint a whole new picture once the small details get changed as we continue to move down this road we will find not only new things for
ourselves but maybe new we learn new things about ourselves brandon is there anything you would like to mention about maybe something new that you've experienced maybe something new that you wanted to introduce to yourself then you use social media to kind of help you get that into that direction um to be honest usually with social media what i try to do to help for myself generally um it's just small little things just like more i just actually i'm going back on
tic tac once again um there's a tick tock that i follow um it actually helps develop a new language um personally me i am hispanic but i don't generally speak to language well but there is a tick tocker that i do follow and like he drops little things here and there little phrases stuff like that and you know like with me and basically like the hispanic community and like also like my parents and all that stuff like it is very important to use the language around in
the hot either like in the house or either when i go see family in south america and like at times it kind of i personally i feel like a disconnect and you know and like with that to my like my own mental health like it kind of frightens me a lot because you know like i want to be able to communicate with the other parts of my family who don't speak english but like at the same time it's kind of like i kind of need to like kind of like put the work in i need to
put the work in and able to do that so i do use social media here and there i know there's like an app called duolingo like i catch myself on there at time of time using that as well it is a great app great app so like i mean it kind of helps you bridge together that connection and like i mean like it's people don't normally see social media as kind of like the educational platform all the time it's always just like bam like right on your face this is what it is this is what's going on in
the world rather than um like like you said like yeah having it really help you tap into your roots and like your upbringing and like for you like communicating with other people and like that's also important too because like half of my family is hispanic and like another part of it is brazilian so i mean the like just tapping into that language that culture it definitely helps you connect more in person too like it's not just making those connections online with other people so i mean i think
that's great that's a great aspect of social media so as you were saying brandon you were saying how duolingo has really actually opened your eyes to new social media things that you can find and that you can actually help yourself which is great to hear however with um social media becoming such a difficult conversation to have with mental health it does still lead to the separation which you the listener and now the viewer needs to understand on reasons why you should maybe should disconnect
and sometimes we look at disconnecting as a hard thing to do and for me personally i love social media it's my business it's my i've worked really hard at creating great photos creating great content and so like it's hard for me to disconnect right but sometimes we really truly need the disconnection and so i want to give you some tips some experiences that i've gone through that have helped me disconnect in little ways and again the small details will kind of change a lot
so one of my things is i turn off all notifications so i try to not have any social media apps send me notifications whether it's likes follows or whatever i did that with instagram about three or four years ago so i don't get notifications from instagram because it allows me to not check my phone as much so i really enjoy it when someone messages me someone uh likes something i don't i don't see it i don't get the notification for it so it so it doesn't make me check my phone as much
and again making sure that these small details are taken care of so that you don't keep checking your phone because once you're on your phone i feel like that's where it leads to like i'm going to go on tick-tock it's hard to put it back down yeah i 100 agree i feel like once you have it in your hand and you're scrolling it's hard to stop oh i checked facebook and i got to check instagram oh now i got to check twitter no i gotta check my youtube feed i think the one
thing that pisses me off is when i close a social media app and then i go straight back to that should i do that often oh my god i did that last night it's so annoying in the morning dude it's so frustrating it's so frustrating like how did this happen i was just off of this but shine i know you have another uh tip that you give to the listener and the viewer what are what's your tip so when it comes to devices and you know like whatever you use throughout the day
i i tend to separate it like i have this studio room i got my bedroom and before i used to just have everything inside of my bedroom my my gaming console my computer my phone everything so i mean for me that really created like a mental clutter for myself and you know i so every time that i went into my room i would think oh like this is the place where i relax and it's the place where i study this is a place where i get work done and when you live life like that
things kind of cross into each other and you know it doesn't really help you progress you almost kind of like stunt your growth when it comes to things like that so i what i do now is like i have my computer here i have the recording uh area here just the studio i i try to come in here like not to relax but to actually get some work done you know and it really when it comes to you and yourself when you're trying to progress in something you really need to separate
that and like i know you you mentioned um before this that when it comes to scrolling through social media you want to leave it to one device which i mean you should because otherwise like every single device you go on it's not like mentally gonna click with you that i'm supposed to be doing work it's just gonna start being like i wanna scroll through i wanna see what's up and you know you can't really like set aside that separate time for yourself mentally
with these other devices like if you're scrolling through facebook on your computer phone on your ipad whatever tablet you have whatever other device it's just like that's all you're going to see all of your devices as so i mean it's good to categorize everything and kind of create this habit with all your different things you know so you can kind of do little things here and there but also be organized and not just have everything bunched in because i mean really you can't get anything
done when it's just all in one package when it's nice to uh you need to rewire your brain so that your brain doesn't when you when you have a tv and things like in distractions like that in your place where you're supposed to be sleeping your brain thinks of it as like an activity rather than an area of uh where you need to get your rest um as we talked about the disconnecting using the only one device for social media i know you've had a lot of experience well with doing that is there
any tips any advice that you want yeah definitely that's a nice watch by the way bro for me uh i used to you know have everything on my phone and i kind of just switched it up to like i have my phone on me all the time right everybody always has their phone on them so it's easy at when you're when you're bored like we've talked about to just pick up your phone and be able to check everything or that's where you post everything all that kind of stuff so i moved all my social media um things that
i did i actually went like kind of cold turkey on social media for a long time i just deleted all the apps from my phone i deleted facebook from my phone the only thing i have is messenger just to communicate with people that's generally my prime communication because i don't have imessage because i'm lame um so on my computer that's where i will check facebook if i ever need to and i'm not even on my computer that often so it also limits me to of checking it you
know every every second of every day um i used to check instagram and twitter and stuff on there too but that's like my place at home so if i'm not home i can't even check my social media so i just leave it at that's where i would check it in my office that's it see that's the beautiful thing about these little details once small details start getting added in they start leading to bigger and bigger steps and for you to maybe realize that i need to disconnect more and these are some little tips
there's many other tips out there that you can definitely use to disconnect but now we want to kind of help the listener and viewer really understand on where are we now with social media where would be we where would be we without it and where can we go with it so right now i feel as if social media is like unders they're understanding mental health a little bit better they're understanding that there are people out there who are scrolling through these things and maybe
physically hurting themselves to look a certain way to do a certain thing i think this is just the beginning of it i think this is a new change it's just starting and with companies companies need to evolve social media needs to evolve for it to keep surviving and that's the only way for social media to keep growing is for these companies to try to help the people who are watching it to maybe help themselves with their mental health so we need to understand that
at this moment there's i don't believe they've taken the the big step yet i feel like they're just scratching the surface on trying to understand not only mental health but trying to understand how social media affects mental health and not just in a negative way but in a positive way and i feel like once these companies have this together they'll be able to create better uh software to create better systems to create better ways to help people because in the end without us
social media will not continue without a viewer without someone clicking without someone scrolling they won't have social media so now the question is where would be where would we be without it where would we ha if we didn't have social media in this world now would we still be able to communicate regularly what do you think cheyenne i think that we would still be able to communicate but just we wouldn't have as great of an outreach as we do today you know because there's many um
there's a bunch of tiny like smaller societies in this world that now have a voice because of social media and i think that's like it's super important for our society to progress you know we need to see all these smaller communities and like kind of bring them up to speed and i think like the past this past like decade has really like brought everybody up to speed you know and everybody's like like people try to spin like a negative light on it and say that like oh like we're
like going backwards in time but like really like it's just we're getting people up to the same like level that we're at in these larger communities so like i mean like in some like town like in the middle of nowhere uh basically like where we're at right now it's just like north dakota like we we wouldn't know what the [ __ ] is going on in in north dakota or like just anywhere else uh around the world like we wouldn't see like social issues going on in in china in russia like literally
anywhere is it just an example by the way china please do not ban our [ __ ] podcast i beg you but like it it really gives us a chance to communicate more and really give the voiceless a voice we just got banned by china no hate to north dakota but what we need to focus on where we we where would we be without social media i totally agree with you guys on the communication aspect getting to know and understanding what other people's lives are cultures things that open our eyes to new
experiences that other cultures do that we have no idea what they're doing on whether it could be good or bad or whatever that leads to and now we're in this stage of where we're going with it so will how do you feel about where we're going with social media and maybe give us some thoughts about where we're going to be and and what it can be but also what it could lead to in a negative light well here's the thing mental health please yeah with it where we are now i think companies maybe not even
companies yet but more smaller companies especially even just individual people are realizing how like toxic social media can be like they are addressing within themselves and having that ability to address like okay this is not good for me and that's a good first step i think this is all kind of just beginning and just like you said um social media giants if facebook twitter they need people to be on their platform to make money and right now on the corporate side of things that
that is their goal is however it gets done you get them to keep scrolling you get them to uh do you do whatever it takes to get them to stay on this page and i don't think that's going to last much longer the way people are acting for me like i used to be that person who would look at social media waste time and i would feel terrible about myself and and that's another thing just to throw in there there's for more of a personal reason and i was a very overweight individual in high school and
if i didn't have social media to see these people who are bettering their lives and looking as awesome as they are and again there's two ways to look at it you can view it as like this negative thing to say wow these like i will never be this great or you can turn that into a drive to create your own personal better habits and that's exactly what i was able to do so instead of looking at things negative people are now looking at things in such a positive way and i can see that through all of us
especially but even people like i just see like people don't use social media for the aspect of just scrolling as much as they used to they're able to realize like this isn't doing much good for me and where i can see this going is i think it can go down two roads i think uh people will either start to create essentially their own uh social media giants where like you know we have like private discords and private servers of people who are now very popular and again social media gave
them that ability they gave these very small businesses and personal individuals like people streaming on twitch platforms to make money from and again it's to make money but people who are genuine and really care about their community and that's taking over that's taking people away from facebook and um bigger social media companies and i think these big corporations are starting to realize that and they're gonna start following suit again like you've said with more mental health
awareness and it just in the way that these algorithms work adjusting these things so i think more than likely we're on a positive road to positive change and we are the reason that that's going to happen the the people the individuals they need to be on their platform is the only way that's going to happen and we're very thankful for social media because without social media we would not be able to post these things about yna to give you guys the mental health
information that you need to really open your eyes to maybe things that you'd rather maybe need to disconnect maybe you need to understand a little bit more about maybe the positives and the negatives of social media addiction the boredom this instant gratification that's a big one and it really is and we all want to come here and remind you to please please please please remember that you are not alone no we're here with you we did just drop our new yna t-shirts we would love for you to check
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